Towards a Healthcare 4.0 Vocabulary: A Patent-Based Approach

In modern knowledge economies, intellectual property assets are both engines of development and drivers of social transition. One of the most widely used approaches to identifying promising emerging technologies, record the direction of technological development and R&D activities and forecast innovation is patent analysis. The paper analyses the patent information available in the Knowledge-Share (KS) platform, an Italian patents database, first by using Natural Language Processing and clustering techniques, and then, by means of a complex network analysis on the most frequent words, focuses the analysis on those clusters inherent to health in order to investigate the technologies used and their applications to the Healthcare 4.0 domain. The paper aims to a first attempt of formulating a vocabulary of Healthcare 4.0 based on the patents produced by the most important Italian universities and research centers.